Secrets In The Walls

August 20, 2009|By Mark St. John Erickson, merickson@dailypress.com 247-4783

Any time you start taking apart the walls and ceilings of an old house, you're bound to run into surprises.

So my wife and I held our breath when demolition work started inside our 1924 home in old downtown Hampton, where - after years of saving and planning - we've embarked on a renovation project that we hope will both preserve the unspoiled Arts & Crafts character of our American Foursquare house and drag its mostly original kitchen and pantry from what seems like the Stone Age into the 21st century.

Carpenter Charles Barker and his assistant, Steve Quinley, started with the varnished baseboards along the floor and the casework around the windows and doors, teasing out this heart-pine trim so it could be saved intact for the new kitchen. Then the traditional double-hung window sashes came out along with their frames, pulleys and weights - all of it set aside to be used again in recreating the original architectural texture.

It wasn't until the Sawzall came out and the old plaster and lath began to fall that general contractor David Smith of Seaside Design called me about the first surprise.

Instead of running east-west like the first-floor joists, all the second-floor joists were running north-south, which was going to create problems rerouting the air supply line for our high-efficiency gas boiler. And when work moved from the kitchen and pantry to the ceiling of the adjacent dining room - where we'd planned to put in new plumbing supply and drain lines to a leaky upstairs bathroom - the complications created by that unexpected change of direction mounted.

Even more problematic was a 3-inch layer of concrete some 1920s craftsman had poured on top and around the 2-by-10s in the bathroom in order to lay a tile floor. The extra weight was just too much for joists trying to hold up over a 141/2-foot span - even though some had been strengthened with additional 2-by-10s sistered in on the sides.

Adding to that burden were all the notches cut by old-time plumbers more intent on carving out a path for their pipes than preserving the joists' load-carrying power. The same plumbers also ran their drain lines through the middle of the concrete, making them impossible to replace without breaking through the tile floor.

"Sooner or later, they're going to leak," said E.T. Lawson plumber Jeff Britt, sizing up the old iron and copper drains. "So unless you want to go back and take the ceiling out again in the future, the floor has to come out so we can get at them."

As bad and expensive as this added demolition job sounded, it didn't solve all the problems uncovered in what was supposed to be a secondary part of the project. Though we'd planned to sister the sagging floor joists, it now looked like that remedy would not be enough.

"I'm going to have to run a girder to carry those joists," Smith said. "And in order to support the weight, it's going to have to be point-loaded off new piers in the crawl space."

Even good advice is hard to take when it involves paying unexpected bills from a fixed amount of money. But the problems could have been worse.

For years I'd suspected some unseen failure in our house's main girders as the cause of all the plaster cracks and sagging on the second floor. But when this much-maligned backbone emerged from behind the walls, a few minutes work with string lines proved that the center beams on both the first and second floor were within 1/2 inch of dead level - and that my fears of more serious structural problems were unfounded.

"This is the time when you're going to find all the nasty stuff," project architect Ed Pease said. "And if this is all you've got to worry about, you're probably doing pretty good."

After all the dust had cleared, in fact, it quickly became clear that not all the surprises uncovered by the demolition work were unwelcome. Inside the pantry, a deep notch cut into the ends of the roof rafters actually provided some unexpected head room, providing Smith with a way to even out an unavoidably awkward, two-level ceiling.

"I honestly don't have any idea why they notched them that way," he said. "But it's going to give us the space we need to raise that part of the ceiling by about 21/2 inches - and that's just what we need to level it all out without any noticeable loss of height."

Flattening out the new kitchen ceiling will generate some real dividends, especially with what had previously been an irregular wall cabinet plan. But that wasn't the only good surprise we got from the demolition.

After nearly 30 hours of hard, dirty work carried out on weekends and after hours, I managed to remove an abandoned boiler chimney, exposing a strategically located shaft that runs from the crawl space to the attic.